I wasn't sure if I wanted to blog about this, but then I thought, why not? As with any of my posts, maybe I'll help someone in some way who may be going through a similar situation.
Full disclosure, I haven't felt "right" in over two years. Each year I get my wellness exam and have a full workup of the blood tests that go along with that. Other than thyroid levels being slightly off one time, things have looked pretty good so the not feeling right wasn't making sense. For the majority of the last two years, I just figured the thyroid medicine wasn't doing its job and I was frustrated with Hashimoto's and hypothyroidism in general.
This year, my GP spent more time with me at my annual visit because she had a resident with her. I was able to mention issues that I normally forgot to bring up and would subsequently wave off. Those "little things" led her to add a few different orders to the panel of bloodwork, which ultimately led me to see some specialists and get to where I am now.
I have had asthma for most of my life so being short of breath wasn't something I was overly concerned about except that getting up the stairs at work had become more challenging (I live in a two-story but don't get winded at home). My allergist had given me a new inhaler to try at the beginning of the pandemic but it wasn't always doing the trick. That led to me having a chest x-ray, a CT scan, and seeing a cardiologist. None of that showed anything he was concerned about, which seemed to be the end of things with the GP. Frustrated, I took matters into my own hands, and I made an appointment with an endocrinologist. She and I didn't hit it off the first visit, but after lots of questions and more bloodwork, I also had a brain MRI and an adrenal CT scan ordered. That triggered a phone call from my GP wondering if I was handling all of the news well enough.
One of the findings was that I had a baseball-sized cyst on one of my ovaries. I also had some hormones out of wack. Finally, things started to make sense and fall into place. Within about three months I also had an endoscopy with a gastroenterologist, surgery for the ovarian cysts (yes, there were more that hadn't shown up in the scans), a visit with a surgical oncologist, and a visit and exam with a vision specialist. That visit with the oncologist is exactly what you think - for about a week or so, I thought I had cancer. Technically, all of the tumors in my body that showed up on the scans can grow and spread like cancer cells do which is problematic for the surrounding organs. I'm not Googling to get this info - one of the specialists actually said, "technically, this is a form of cancer".
We cried a lot, I told most of my close friends and close family. If you weren't in that number, please don't be offended. It's not easy to drop that bomb on anyone and the last thing I wanted to do was be Debbie Downer for your day/weekend/vacation. We never told our daughter because how do you explain something like that to a little person? Thankfully, when I directly asked the oncologist, "do I have cancer?", he said, "no", but if I want to consider genetic counseling at some point he would back me on that.
The current status is: I have a tumor in my pituitary (enlarged gland and headaches), a cyst on one of my lungs (labored breathing at times), a tumor on my pancreas (no symptoms), and a benign tumor on one of my kidneys that's been getting watched for the last three years now. The pancreatic tumor will also get watched annually, and my next eye doctor visit is in 6 months. In mid-November, I will see a pituitary specialist for the first time. New medicines, more scans, more blood tests, and possibly more surgery are in my future. Did I mention that the endoscopy and the laparoscopic surgery were on the same day?
So, that's what's been up in our house. We are relieved that I am currently cancer-free and although things are still healing from the laparoscopic surgery, I feel much better now that the giant cyst is gone. The thought of not being around my child or my husband at any point is incredibly sad to me, but thinking you may only have a few years left with them is utterly heartbreaking. I hope the second chance I feel like we've been given is long-lasting and not a false sense of hope for something worse to come.
